It is a tough gig, but someone has to do it. In pursuit of intelligence on the state of Tory morale, I attended the Spectator magazine’s July party, the highlight of the Conservative summer calendar. You won’t find a greater density of senior Tories per square metre anywhere else. So I trawled for opinions about their chances of hanging on to power at the general election. One former cabinet minister inhaled a glug of champagne before replying: “Obviously, we will be out. The question is whether it will be for five years or 10.”
The obvious source of their despondency is that they are trailing Labour in the opinion polls by about 20 points. That unpopularity will be confirmed when the Tories take a pummelling in the trio of byelections which will take place on Thursday week. A fourth threatening byelection is in prospect after the damning verdict on Chris Pincher by the cross-party standards committee. There will be a fifth if Nadine Dorries ever gets round to making good on her cry-baby threat to quit parliament because, boohoo, she didn’t get a peerage.
This is all grim stuff for the Tories, but it does not on its own account for their despair. History offers plenty of examples of governments being way behind in the polls and suffering thumping byelection losses only to bounce back and win the subsequent general election. What’s most crushing for Tory spirits is their lack of reasons to believe that there will be a revival in their fortunes in the time left. A few months ago, Isaac Levido, their chief electoral strategist, told Conservative MPs they had “a narrow path to victory” if they united behind Rishi Sunak and allowed the prime minister the space to make them look more competent and trustworthy. This was based on the shaky assumptions that the Tory party is capable of being disciplined, the squeeze on living standards will be easing by 2024, and the prime minister will be able to go into the election saying he has delivered on his quintet of pledges. Mr Sunak is either going nowhere or backwards on the infamous five, as I explored last week, and even fulfilling those promises may not bring him much benefit. The outlook suggests that the savage crunch on living standards will continue into next year, and may be accompanied by a recession, shattering Conservative hopes of generating any kind of feelgood factor before they have to face the voters. From a Tory point of view, the economic cycle and the electoral one are frighteningly out of sync.
To give you a completely fair account, I do still encounter some Tories who think they can glimpse a possibility of winning if a lot goes right for them and a lot goes wrong for Labour. “Difficult, but not impossible,” says one of the cheerier characters in the cabinet. These residual optimists are now heavily outnumbered by the fatalists who have concluded that defeat is baked in.
To further deepen their sense of impending doom, many of their traditional friends in the City, business and the media have read the runes and are preparing for a Labour government. There has been much chatter about Sir Keir Starmer accepting an invitation for talks with Rupert Murdoch and the latter’s newspapers carrying two opinion pieces by the Labour leader in the same week, one in the Times and the other in the Sun. As much should be read into the media mogul thinking he ought to get closer to Sir Keir, and the Murdoch newspapers, which urged a Tory vote at the 2010 election and every one since, being eager to showcase the views of Labour’s leader. It’s a big blow to Tory morale when they can see the mates they used to be able to count on making eyes at the other guy.
Mr Sunak is smart enough to know there is a pungent whiff of terminal decay emanating from his government, but apparently not clever enough to find ways of dispelling it. When he took over at Number 10, Labour worried that he would deploy an often successful trick from the Tory playbook by representing himself as a “fresh start” and a “clean break” with the carnival of chaos and depravity that preceded him. Labour people are both astonished and relieved that he has failed to do this. The Tory leader was presented with a golden opportunity to repudiate the Johnson era when the Commons found the disgraced former prime minister guilty of telling repeated lies to parliament. Mr Sunak blew that chance to reset what voters think of his party when the prime minister declined to condemn his predecessor and then ducked the vote.
The Conservatives increasingly behave like a party that has given up. Literally so in the case of the chunky number of their MPs, many of them relatively young, who are jumping before they are pushed by announcing that they won’t be standing for parliament again. They’re not fighters, they’re quitters. There will be more of them as the election gets closer. Then there are others who intend to stand, but not with any expectation of keeping their seats. They will do so because an MP who retires voluntarily doesn’t receive any redundancy while an MP who is ejected by the voters gets a “loss of office” payment.
Some who think they have a chance of survival are trying to improve their odds by staying away from Westminster to pay more attention to their constituencies. I would never want to discourage an MP from doing his or her duty to the voters, but I have bad news for them. Experience suggests that being known locally as a diligent servant of the constituency is rarely worth a huge sack of “personal votes”. If the people have had enough of this government, the swing will sweep away rotten and decent Conservative MPs alike.
A further sign that they are losing the will to live is the indifference among his own MPs to Mr Sunak’s pleas to “unite or die”. Whenever he tries to get out a message around which he wants his party to rally, there is invariably an eruption of distracting and divisive noise from one of the Tory factions. The most recent contribution came from a reactionary sect of MPs styling themselves the “New Conservatives”. If there is anything novel about them, it is certainly not their ideas. One of this outfit’s suggestions is that immigration should be curbed by stopping work visas allowing people from abroad to help staff our care homes. This would make the crises in the care sector and the NHS even more acute. The government is not going to adopt this self-destructive policy and this was surely known to that groupuscule. What they and other attention-seeking Tory factions are doing is positioning themselves for the aftermath of defeat and indicating where they will try to drag the Conservatives in opposition.
Some on the populist right even give the distinct impression of wanting to see their party out of power. I hear Tories saying that “it will do us good to have a spell in opposition”, the notion being that they will then regroup and revitalise. I can recall some Labour people saying that to themselves in the run-up to the 2010 election. They have since had 13 years in opposition to learn to be very careful about what you wish for.
This swelling anticipation of defeat is accompanied by a decline in faith in Mr Sunak. He’s lost the voters who are awarding him dismal approval scores. He’s now losing his own troops. The latest ConservativeHome survey of the mood of Tory activists gives negative ratings to the prime minister and eight other members of the cabinet. Despite all these travails, he looks safe in his job for now. I heard no talk of a putsch against him at the Spectator bash. Tory MPs may be addicted to plotting, but the great majority of them can sense that they would look utterly absurd to change prime minister three times in one parliament. Even more importantly, they can’t see any available substitute who would make a better leader. And remembering the calamitous reign of Liz Truss, they have recent experience of how easily they could land themselves with a worse leader.
This is a consolation for Mr Sunak, but also another example of the depression settling over his party. Tory MPs are sticking with him not because they are confident that he can lead them to victory, but because so many of them can no longer see any alternative to defeat.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
